Storing output messages inside constants in PHP

Question

Will it downgrade performance significantly (or exhaust the server with http requests), or maybe ill advised, to do something like this

echo "<span>enter_username_message</span>";

and centralize this constant along with all output messages in one file, so that those could be changed without getting into the code:

define('enter_username_message','username please');

that way, if someone were viewing the website in its spanish version, I could simply direct php to require all those output-message constants from a spanish file.

define('enter_username_message','username por favor');

what do you think?

Answer 1

You should probably just use gettext: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php

It's designed for the kind of thing you're talking about.

Edit Apparently PHP gettext isn't thread safe (ugh, I hate PHP), so perhaps look at something like Zent Translate with the gettext adapter, which is thread safe: http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.translate.adapter.html

My reason for suggesting using something gettext based is the various tools that are available for creating and editing gettext .po/.mo files, which make creating translations easier than just going through some text file and editing things.